MDDM23: A Digestionary Process

[Dave Monroe]

"'The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,-- to be
remember'd only for having trespass'd so ingeniously
outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided his
Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result
could not be distinguish'd from that found in Nature.'
   "'A mechanickal Duck that shits?  To whom can it
matter,' Mr. Whitpot, having remov'd his Wig, is
irritably kneading it like a small Loaf, '-- who
besides a farmer would even recognize Duck Waste,
however compulsively accurate?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 372)

This just in ...

Wood, Gaby.  Living Dolls: A Magical History
   of the Quest for Mechanical Life.  London:
   Faber, 2002.

>From Simon Scaffer, "Wise Guys and Living Dolls ,"
Manchester Guardian, Sunday, February 24th, 2002 ...

"The odd idea that machine intelligence successfully
replicates deceit has a long history. Gaby Wood's new
and magical tour of that history offers seductive
glimpses of its major landmarks. The Turing Test
appears in her story right at its start, but then
we're taken back to old-regime French silk factories,
plush showrooms in Regency London, Edison's
high-pressure 'invention factories', PT Barnum's
circuses and the astonishing Paris cinema of the
fin-de-siècle. Along the way, Wood recounts her own
quest for the secrets of the machine-makers, the
weirdly obsessive artisans who devoted their lives to
replicating living beings with clockwork and
electricity, rubber tubes and air pumps.

[...]

"Her history starts, as it should, with the mechanical
duck manufactured by the eighteenth-century French
entrepreneur Jacques de Vaucanson. Especially splendid
was this duck's shit, perfectly faked. The automatic
bird didn't defecate what it ate. Instead, in a
masterpiece of enlightened chemistry, Vaucanson
concocted some appropriately smelly faecal substitute.
Wood reasonably guesses Vaucanson's own
well-documented obsession with his guts was here
turned into a stunning mechanical game.

"A couple of years ago I met a brilliant English
artisan who'd been hired to make a modern replica of
Vaucanson's duck - most of our chat focused on just
how this trick defecation worked. But spread out on
his table were lumps of dead duck, bits of wing,
tendons and feet.

"Never far away from the mechanical joke is the threat
of death and horror and Wood does not miss this
lesson. Her stories always end in the dark...."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4361923,00.html

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer.
   Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle,
   and the Experimental Life.  Princeton, NJ:
   Princeton UP, 1985.

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/2353.html

http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/ShapinSchaffer/ShapinSchaffer_Seeing.html

The reviewer here knows his "rubber tubes and
air-pumps," believe you me ...

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